CTO may end up with 100 mill oz too, who knows ?That's not the...

CTO may end up with 100 mill oz too, who knows ?
That's not the problem, here.

Gold is dispersed everywhere as we all know.
The suburban back yards of Melbourne probably contain more gold than CTO - and we don't even have to tunnel for it. We can just dig it up with a shovel.
- but no one is suggesting that we can start economically strip mining our backyards. It's obviously uneconomic to do so...as the grades are obviously too low, even, if it's open pit mining.

In CTO's case the gold pods look like being too far apart - and a lot of expensive tunneling is required to get to those pods before CTO can mine them ... and the effective grades coming to the surface mixed in with all the mountains of barren rock, could be just too low - to make it profitable.

After 8 years of uneconomic mining - it's easy to draw that conclusion.

Contrast CTO with KRM - which has a smaller (but steadily growing) resource.
KRM was profitably mining from the word go !! - producing a profit and paying its way, without capital raising , even at 10,000 oz/annum. So as it's paying for itself as it grows.
KRM has wider veins - that is the key, so while it too is tunneling, it's producing gold with much, much less dilution.

Let's say ..
CTO digs a 5x5 metre tunnel (25sq metre)... and if we use a specific gravity of about 3, that means each metre of tunnel equates to 80 cubic tons of rock.
and with a gradient of 7 to 1 - we need to realise the tunnel only descends 1/7th metre for every horizontal metre.

Let's imagine then the scale of dilution happening - how much rock gets mixed in when you finally get to the pods - that are probably hundreds of metres apart ?

CTO may start off with 14g/T ore grades in the veins - but after taking into account the expensive tunneling to get to those veins, what ends up on the surface is probably a much, much lower grade - I'm guessing less than 0.5g/T and even that still needs to be crushed and processed .. and that takes a lot of energy and money.

We may as well take a punt in our backyards.